How does cohen define a right

A being might have a duty directed at it, but not have a right to what the duty requires. Examples of duties not based on rights:. Similarly, Cohen thinks we have duties to animals based on common human decency even though those duties are not based the animals' nonexistent rights. Possessing rights does not entail possessing responsibilities rights of A do not entail that A must have duties.

Even though Cohen might be interpreted to suggest he thinks they do, having rights does not entail having responsibilities or duties , because human infants have rights, but no responsibilities. The Marginal Case Argument:. If one tries to justify certain treatment of animals e. Cohen's reply :. But human infants, severely retarded humans, and other "marginal case humans" are members of a group whose typical members are moral agents, so they do have rights.

One should treat individuals on the basis of their own individual characteristics. For example, it would be wrong to deny a woman a job at a construction site because she belongs to a group most of whose members can't lift extremely heavy objects, if that woman can lift them.

James Rachels has a similar response to Cohen:. But the idea will not bear close inspection. A simple thought-experiment will expose the problem. Suppose what is probably impossible that an unusually gifted chimpanzee learned to read and speak English.

And suppose he eventually was able to converse about science, literature, and morals. Finally he expresses a desire to attend university classes. Humans can read, talk, and understand science. Chimps cannot. Is this a good argument? Regardless of what other arguments might be persuasive, this one is not.

It assumes that we should determine how an individual is to be treated, not on the basis of its qualities, but on the basis of other individuals' qualities. The argument is that this chimp may be barred from doing something that requires reading, despite the fact that he can read, because other chimps cannot read.

That seems not only unfair, but irrational. Unlike the differences between the sexes and races, there are vast morally relevant differences between humans and animals e. Replies: 1 There are morally relevant differences between humans too; 2 Although species membership typically correlates with morally relevant difference e.

Worries: True of all experimentation on animals? Blow torching pigs for knowledge of skin burns? Draise and LD 50 tests? Animal pain caused for scientific curiosity or basic research, rather than applied research?

Cohen thinks that we should increase, not decrease our use of animals in medical experimentation and that it is wrong not to do this. Worries: Cohen must argue that spending resources on preventative medicine e.

Cohen thinks it morally permissible to discount animal pain i. But is the pain caused greater? Cohen claims consistency requires opponents of animal experimentation to abstain from all uses of animals.

There are relevant distinctions to be made between kinds of animals and various uses of animals both biomedical and non-biomedical that Cohen ignores. For example, there is nothing inconsistent about eating shrimp or oysters invertebrates who probably don't feel pain and being opposed to animal experimentation on chimps. Also why think drinking milk, wearing leather, fishing, meat eating, going to a zoo, having a fish tank, and owning pets are the same moral issue?

Does consistency really require abstaining from all these if one opposes some animal experimentation? However, the possession of rights presupposes a moral status not attained by the vast majority of living things. The capacity for moral judgment that distinguishes humans from animals is not a test to be administered to human beings one by one. Persons who are unable , because of some disability, to perform the full moral functions natural to human beings are certainly not ejected from the moral community.

Humans are of such a kind that they may be the subject of experiments only with their voluntary consent. The choices they make freely must be respected. Animals are of such a kind that it is impossible for them to give or withhold voluntary consent or to make a moral choice. What humans retain when disabled, animals have never had. Human beings can act immorally, but only they, never wolves or monkeys, can discern, by applying some moral rule to the facts of a case that a given act ought or ought not to be performed.

Communal behavior among animals, even when most intelligent and most endearing, does not approach autonomous morality in this sense. Animals can certainly suffer and surely ought not to be made to suffer needlessly. However, in inferring from these premises that biomedical research causing animals distress is largely wrong, the critic commits two serious errors.

The first error is the assumption, often explicitly defended, that all sentient animals have equal moral standing. Between a dog and human being, there is no moral difference; hence the pains suffered by a dog must be weighed no differently from the pains suffered by humans. To deny such equality, is to give unjust preference to one species over another — it is speciesism. The most influencial statement of this moral equality of species was made by Peter Singer. A racist violates the principle of equality by giving greater weight to the interests of members of his own race when there is a clash between their interests and the interests of those of another race.

A sexist violates the interest of his own sex. The speciesist allows the interests of his own species to override the greater interests of members of other species. In each case, the pattern is identical. This argument is not a sound one. It draws an offensive moral conclusion from a deliberately devised verbal parallel that is disingenuous. In defense of speciesism, abandoning reliance on animal rights, some critics resort instead to animal sentience — their feelings of pain and distress.

We should desist from this imposition of pain as much as we can. Since all or nearly all experimentation on animals does impose pain and, according to critics should not have to be the case, it should be stopped. The ends sought may be worthy, but those ends do not justify imposing agonies on humans, and by animals the agonies are felt no less.

The laboratory use of animals must be ended or at least sharply curtailed. When balancing the pleasure and pains resulting from the use of animals in research, we must not fail to place on the scales the terrible pains that would have resulted, would be suffered now, and would long continue had animals not been used. Every disease eliminated, every vaccine developed, every method of pain relief devised, every surgical procedure invented, every prosthetic device implanted — virtually every modern medical therapy is due, in part or in whole, to experimentation using animals.

Nor can we ignore in the balancing process the predictable gains in human and animal well-being that are probably achievable in the future but will not be achieved were the decision made to desist from using animal subjects for research. Opposition to the use of animals in research is based on arguments of two different kinds — those relying on the alleged rights of animals and those relying on the consequences for animals.

Both arguments will fail. We do have obligations to animals, but they have no rights against us on which research can infringe. In calculating the consequences of animal research, we must weigh all the long-term benefits of the results achieved, to animals and to humans, and in that calculation we must not assume the moral equality of all animate species.

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